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By now you get the idea of how the day starts. Interestingly as it was 26°C outside today not many people seemed to have bothered turning up so we were put into groups of four rather that eight. We set off in the van up to a community center in a pretty undesirable part of the city where once again we did the hanging around and drinking tea for an hour before getting stuck in.

The place we were working today was a short drive from the community center and was a small area of grass within a housing estate. Around the outside of this area were thickly overgrown brambles, trees and bushes and also rubbish ranging from bricks to pram wheels. We spent a good hour or so clipping bushes, weeding, fighting with the thickest and sharpest brambles I’ve ever had the misfortune of encountering and clearing up all the dumped waste before heading back to the center for lunch. Our probation officer for the day was a nice guy in his mid to late 50’s and like the fellow from last week got his hands dirty too. After lunch we went back to carry on with the job in hand. The sun was quite high in the sky now and it made for very hard work indeed (the first time I can say hard work since this whole community service thing started for me). Across the road from us some travelers had tied up a couple of horses who seemed most unsettled by our presence but did not interfere with what we were doing. At about 2.30pm we had cleaned up most of the area and left all the debris in a large pile that looked suspiciously like a bonfire. I asked our supervisor what would be done with the huge pile of clippings, branches and rubbish and he assured me that the council would be there to take it away the next day, I hope he’s right as a strong wind would certainly make the area worse than before we had started. For once I didn’t have a bitter feeling about only working a few actual hours on site. Even with half the number of us there we seemed to have gotten twice as much done.

This is the first week I can see exactly where we have been and why it is of benefit to the local community. On the way back we stopped to pick up some other community payback people from the probation trust allotments, which I look forward to working in at some point. I went home this afternoon feeling as if I had actually accomplished something if only from the thorny battle scars and the sweat soaked clothes.